1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the distribution of messages within a network of processors, and more particularly, to a high capacity, fault-tolerant multicast message distribution system.
2. Description of Related Art
In some multicast systems a group of recipients intended to receive a message is explicitly named in a message header as a multicast group address; in other schemes, such as publish/subscribe systems, the content of each published message is matched against the subscription specifications of each subscriber (or aggregated sets of subscribers) and the message is distributed to the subscribers having matching subscriptions.
By building such a system out of a number of computer processors and inter-processor communication facilities such as local area network adapters and electronic switching fabrics, the capacity and the fault-tolerance (reliability) of the system can be increased. Clustered systems may, in turn, be interconnected to form larger, more capable computing and messaging systems.
In the prior art, messages are multicast along paths in one or more spanning trees defined over a set of message processing computers (nodes) and communication links. The prior art deals with the problem of node or link failures by recomputing and/or rebuilding an alternative spanning tree. However, no known method exists for scaling the message throughput capacity of a network to handle varying amounts of multicast traffic by adding and subtracting additional or redundant nodes and links.
Therefore, a need exists for a system and method for defining a multicast spanning tree over a set of cells and link bundles, where each cell may include several message processing computers and each link bundle may include several communication links.